I have tried to live by the rules my entire life. My father was a
Command Sergeant Major, U.S. Army, who died of combat related stresses
shortly after his retirement. It was he who instilled in me those
virtues he felt important - honesty, duty, patriotism and obeying the
laws of God and of our various governments. I have served my country,
paid my taxes, worked hard, volunteered and donated my fair share of
money, time and artifacts.

Today, as I approach my 79th birthday, I am heart-broken when I look
at my country and my government. I shall only point out a very few
things, abysmally wrong, which you can multiply by a thousand fold. I
have calculated that all the money I have paid in income taxes during my
entire life cannot even keep the Senate barbershop open for one year!
Only Heaven and a few tight-lipped actuarial types know what the
Senate dining room costs the taxpayers. So please, enjoy your
haircuts and meals on us.

Last year, the president spent an estimated $1.4 billion on himself
and his family. The vice president spends $millions on hotels. They
have had 8 vacations so far this year! And our House of
Representatives and Senate have become America's answer to the Saudi
royal family. You have become the "perfumed princes and princesses" of
our country.

In the middle of the night, you voted in the Affordable Health Care
Act, a.k.a. Obamacare," a bill which no more than a handful of
senators or representatives read more than several paragraphs, crammed
it down our throats, and then promptly exempted yourselves from it
substituting your own taxpayer-subsidized golden health care
insurance.

You live exceedingly well, eat and drink as well as the "one
percenters," consistently vote yourselves perks and pay raises while
making 3.5 times the average U.S. individual income, and give up
nothing while you (as well as the president and veep) ask us to
sacrifice due to sequestration (for which, of course, you plan to
blame the Republicans, anyway).

You understand very well the only two rules you need to know -

(1) How to get elected, and

(2) How to get re-elected.

And you do this with the aid of an eagerly willing and partisan press,

speeches permeated with a certain economy of truth,

and by buying the votes of the greedy, the ill-informed and under-educated citizens

(and non-citizens, too many of whomdo vote)

who are looking for a handout rather than a job.

Your so-called "safety net" has become a hammock
for the lazy. And (what is it now?) about 49 or 50 million dollars on food
stamps - to pretty much all Democrat voters - and the program is
absolutely rife with fraud and with absolutely no congressional oversight?

I would offer that you are not entirely to blame. What changed you is
the seductive environment of power in which you have immersed
yourselves. It is the nature of both houses of Congress which requires
you to subordinate your virtue in order to get anything done until you
have achieved a leadership role. To paraphrase President Reagan, it
appears that the second oldest profession (politics), bears a
remarkably strong resemblance to the oldest.

As the hirsute first Baron, John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton
(1834-1902) [English historian and moralist], so aptly and accurately
stated, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts
absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men." I'm only guessing
that this applies to the female sex as well. Tell me, is there a more
corrupt entity in this country than Congress?

While we middle class people continue to struggle, our government
becomes less and less transparent, more and more bureaucratic, and
ever so much more dictatorial, using Czars and Secretaries to tell us
(just to mention a very few) what kind of light bulbs we must
purchase, how much soda or hamburgers we can eat, what cars we can
drive, gasoline to use, and what health care we must buy. Countless
thousands of pages of regulations strangle our businesses costing the
consumer more and more every day.

As I face my final year, or so, with cancer, my president and my
government tell me "You'll just have to take a pill!"

while you, Senator, your colleagues, the president,

and other exulted government officials and their families

will get the best possible health care

- on our tax dollars -

until you are called home by your Creator

while also enjoying a retirement beyond my wildest dreams,

which of course, you voted for yourselves and we pay for.

The chances of you reading this letter are practically zero as your
staff will not pass it on, but with a little luck, a form letter
response might be generated by them with an auto signature applied,
hoping we will believe that you, our senator or representative, has
heard us and actually cares. This letter will, however, go on line
where many others will have the chance to read one person's opinion,
rightly or wrongly, about this government, its administration and its
senators and representatives.

I only hope that, occasionally, you might quietly thank the taxpayer for
all the generous entitlements which you have voted for yourselves,

for which, by law, we must pay, unless, of course, they just go on the
$17 trillion national debt for which your children and ours,

and your grandchildren and ours, ad infinitum,

must eventually try to pick up the tab.

My final thoughts are that it must take a person who has

either lost his or her soul, or conscience, or both,

to seek re-election and continue to destroy this country (that I deeply love)

and put it so far in debt that we will never pay it off

while your lot improves by the minute, because of your power.

For you, Senator, will never stand up to the rascals in your House

who constantly deceive the American people.

And that, my dear Senator, is how power has corrupted you and
the entire Congress.

The only answer to clean up this cesspool is term limits.

This, of course, would kill the goose that lays your golden eggs.

And woe be to him (or her) who would dare to bring it up!

Sincerely,

Bill Schoonover
3096 Angela Lane
Oak Harbor, Washington

ONLY AMERICANS CAN SAVE AMERICA...WILL THEY?

Ceg_

03-03-2014 03:05 PM

Well said. It is very sad.

Art Waugh

03-04-2014 02:16 PM

Hit the nail on the head with the old sledge hammer.

Sad part is he is right, they will never see it, and what is worse, if they happen to trip over it in a drunken stupor, they won't care one iota.

The "gimme's" keep putting them back in. Everyone HATES all members of congress, but they think their guy/gal is OK and keep sending them back. When that happens in most all districts in the country, you get the self-perpetuating mess we now have.